Reporters don't like ideological labeling, at least when
it's applied to them. Last November, Dan Rather told Denver radio
host Mike Rosen he hated "to be tagged by someone else's label. I try
really hard not to do that with other people, particularly
people who are in public service and politics."

So do reporters use labeling in campaign coverage?
MediaWatch analysts compared media coverage of the primaries in 1992
with those in 1996. Analysts reviewed evening news coverage of the
four networks (ABC's World News Tonight, CBS Evening News, NBC
Nightly News, and CNN's The World Today and in 1992 World News
or Prime News) for 19 days, starting with the Tuesday before
the New Hampshire primary.

For 1992, the days studied were February 11-29; in 1996,
February 13-March 2, the day of the South Carolina primary. Both
were periods when voters and reporters winnowed down the presidential
field.

The study found the Democratic candidates or their
supporters were labeled "liberal" only four times, none suggesting
extremism. In 1996, GOP candidates or their supporters were labeled
73 times, 45 of the labels suggesting extremism. Analysts also
looked at campaign controveries. Five stories investigated the
finances of Republicans, compared to no investigations of the
Democrats. Charges of bigotry by Pat Buchanan were featured in
20 stories.

Reporters used only four liberal labels to describe the
Democratic candidates, all in the first two days of the 1992 study
period. On February 11, NBC's Andrea Mitchell used two labels,
calling Tom Harkin "a pure liberal and proud of it" with
"old-fashioned liberal solutions." That same night, ABC's Judy
Muller noted: "If Kerrey's health plan strikes some voters as
too liberal, his more conservative proposals for dealing with
the recession seem to strike a chord with voters trying to make
ends meet." The next night, Muller said Harkin calls himself
"an unabashed liberal."

Even when the ideology seemed obvious, reporters stressed
candidates were not liberal, but part of the mainstream. On
February 12, 1992, ABC reporter Chris Bury reported on Jerry Brown: "To
those who hear him, Brown's appeal is his idealism, his calls
for political reform, universal health care, and environmental
activism." Despite that left-wing agenda, Bury underlined:
"Some voters seemed surprised Brown did not sound so radical."
The closest thing to a Clinton label came from ABC's Jack
Smith, who told viewers a week later that Clinton's economic
message "runs counter to so much traditional liberal ideology."
(Did reporters eschew labeling in 1992? No. Stories during the
study period on the 1992 GOP race used the word "conservative"
or "from the right" on 77 occasions, with four references to
extremism.)

In 1996, Republicans and their voters were labeled on 73
occasions. The networks employed 18 conservative descriptions, six
moderate labels, and even four liberal tags (all of them from
reporters quoting Buchanan's attacks on his rivals). On the
18th, NBC's David Bloom said Lamar Alexander was "trying to
bolster his conservative credentials." But extreme terms were
applied on 45 occasions -- all but one to describe Pat
Buchanan. (The exception: Bloom called Alexander a "moderate
Republican with a radical plan of devolution.") Among
references to extremism, 36 used the terms "extreme" or "extremist," but
analysts included the terms "ultraconservative," "too
conservative" or "out of the mainstream."

CBS led the networks with 19 references to Buchanan's
extremism (compared to 12 for CNN, nine for ABC, and five by NBC). On
six occasions, CBS underlined their perception of Buchanan's
ultraconservatism by referring to the networks' Voter News Service
exit poll question asking if Buchanan was too extreme. In a
February 18 interview with Sen. Phil Gramm, Dan Rather asked:
"There is a perception that Buchanan has around him people with
extremist views on race. Do you agree?" On February 25, CBS
weekend anchor John Roberts asked CBS consultant Joe Klein:
"Some call Buchanan an extremist. Others call him as American
as apple pie. What is this fellow's appeal?" Klein replied: "He
is both. He is an extremist and as American as apple pie."

Reporters were not interested in the Democratic candidates'
finances in 1992, airing no stories during the study period.
When Whitewater first came to light on March 8, 1992, NBC aired only one
story, eight days later. CBS made a brief mention on the 8th,
and then dismissed financial questions on the 16th. Reporter
Richard Threlkeld portrayed Whitewater questions as an invasion
of Hillary Clinton's privacy. All together, the networks did
just five full stories on the Clinton finances in 1992.

In 1996, CBS and NBC combined for five stories in just 19
days touching on Republican candidate finances. NBC investigated the
sweetheart deals of Lamar Alexander on February 13, and mentioned
them again February 18. CBS investigated the Alexander deals on
February 15, then added another look at Honey Alexander's and
Elizabeth Dole's financial moves on February 17. On March 2,
CBS suggested hypocrisy in Buchanan's stock ownership of
Fortune 500 corporations. On February 21, CBS reporter Rita
Braver claimed Lamar Alexander had "some financial dealings in
his past that might put Whitewater to shame."

Sparked by the disclosure that Buchanan campaign co-chair
Larry Pratt spoke at forums shared by white supremacists, the
networks aired twenty stories raising the allegation that Buchanan was
bigoted against blacks or Jews. CBS reporter Phil Jones
concluded: "Buchanan has been talking and writing like this for
years. Then, he was on the fringe. Now, he's on the front line
and Americans are starting to take a closer look at Pat
Buchanan's America." The story count didn't include isolated
soundbites, like one voter on the March 2 CBS Evening News:
"Buchanan scares me. He reminds me of a little guy over in Germany
with a mustache."

In September 1992, Bill Clinton claimed: "Nobody's had a
tougher press than I have. No candidate in history has." Some of this
year's candidates may beg to differ.

NewsBites: Jack White, Smear Artist

In an attack uglier than any of this year's attack ads, Time
national correspondent Jack E. White announced the culprits
behind black church burnings in the South. After blaming Pat Buchanan's
"ugly rhetoric" in the March 18 issue, he broadened the smear:
"In fact, all the conservative Republicans, from Newt Gingrich
to Pete Wilson, who have sought political advantage by
exploiting white resentment should come and stand in the
charred ruins of the New Liberty Baptist Church in Tyler
[Alabama]...and wonder if their coded phrases encouraged the
arsonists. Over the past 18 months, while Republicans fulminated about
welfare and affirmative action, more than 20 churches in Alabama
and six other Southern and Border states have been torched."

White noted the current lack of evidence of a racist
conspiracy in the bombings, yet concluded: "But there is already enough
evidence to indict the cynical conservatives who build their
political careers, George Wallace-style, on a foundation of
race-baiting. They may not start fires, but they fan the
flames."

Rooting Against Rush.

Tom Brokaw may have engaged in wishful thinking on the
February 14 Nightly News when he devoted the "NBC News Online" to the
alleged fall of Rush Limbaugh. Brokaw claimed "Election results
are one way to tell who's hot in politics. Then there are the
ratings in this business." Brokaw charged that Limbaugh's
"radio and television ratings have tumbled, and his books, once
huge best-sellers, now are in the discount bins." He added a
plug for the book Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot by Al
Franken, a fellow NBC employee: "And a book about Limbaugh, by
the comedian Al Franken, is riding high, it's number two behind
Hillary Clinton's book and rising fast."

But as Talkers magazine Editor Michael Harrison noted in the
March 3 Washington Times, Limbaugh's ratings "dropped a marginal,
insignificant amount" in the fall. "The guy belches in ratings, and
everyone runs around as if the witch is dead," Harrison said.
He noted Limbaugh is on 650 radio stations, with a total
audience more than double his closest political talk show
competition.

Linda Cecere of the Rush Limbaugh television show told
MediaWatch there are 8.9 million copies of Limbaugh's two books
currently in print, and noted the books have spent a total of 114 weeks
on the New York Times bestseller list (hardcover and
paperback). His first book spent 24 weeks at the #1 spot.
Brokaw ignored how virtually all bestsellers with a big press
run are eventually discounted.

With Friends Like These....

During the usually contentious primary season the media
focused on Republican rifts, but ignored Democratic divisions over
their party leader. With two exceptions the networks failed to
report attacks on President Clinton from two prominent
Democrats. In an interview with Washington Post reporter Martha
Sherrill in the January issue of Esquire magazine Senator Bob
Kerrey (D-Neb.) insisted: "Clinton's an unusually good liar."
Kerrey's extraordinary admission received very little coverage.
Tim Russert, prompted by a Washington Times article, asked
Colorado Gov. Roy Romer about the Kerrey quote on the February 4
Meet the Press.

CNN's Bernard Shaw briefly mentioned the quote on the
February 6 Inside Politics, and added the remarks of Sen. Ernest
Hollings (D-S.C.) who joked of Clinton's poll ratings: "If they get up
to 60 percent, his people tell me Bill can start dating
again." Shaw also relayed a Hollings quote from a South
Carolina paper: "Clinton's as popular as AIDS in South
Carolina." The Hollings quotes received no coverage in the
usually AIDS-sensitive television networks of ABC, NBC and CBS.
By contrast, in December 1994 when Senator Jesse Helms (R-N.C.)
joked that Clinton was so unpopular that he had better bring
bodyguards if he visited any military bases, the Helms remark
generated nine stories on the three broadcast network evening
news shows.

Our Sweet Little Terrorist Helper

In the weeks following the Oklahoma City bombing, the news
media were quick to portray suspect Timothy McVeigh
unsympathetically as a violent extremist, as well they should. But when
26-year-old Lori Berenson was sentenced to life in prison by a
Peruvian military tribunal for being closely involved with the
Marxist terrorists of the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement
(MRTA), the news media tried to portray her sympathetically as a
concerned American who went to Latin America to work for the
poor.

Although she admitted to being affiliated with the MRTA, the
January 22 Time didn't feel that was important: "Her friends
and relatives know Lori Berenson as a compassionate idealist, an
innocent waylaid by her concern for the poor and oppressed of Latin
America." Time concluded: "But Berenson's real passion was always
to help the downtrodden; as a teenager she donated time to a
soup kitchen." A February 4 Washington Post headline read:
"Little Girl Lost. American Lori Berenson, 26, Was a Good
Daughter, A Good Worker, a Good-Hearted Person. In Peru, She
Got Into Trouble. Bad Trouble." On February 21, ABC Prime Time
Live reporter John Quinones used the same approach in a story
titled "To Love A Country": "In the 8th grade, Lori volunteered to work
at a soup kitchen. Later that year she was selected to narrate a
commercial for CARE, an appeal to feed needy children."

This theme was countered by a Mark Falcoff article in the
February 26 issue of The Weekly Standard: "But let the record show
that she is charged not for her views, but for her involvement with a
terrorist group that, in recent years, has been involved in
assassinations, bombings, kidnappings, robberies, and attacks
against innocent people, many of them poor."

Ethics Absentees

The networks continue to ignore ethics complaints against
Democratic leaders of the House of Representatives. In early
February, the networks saw no need for a story when Rep. Jennifer Dunn
(R-Wash.) filed a complaint with the House ethics committee
suggesting House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt may have
evaded capital gains taxes on a land swap.

The February 23 Washington Times reported that Gephardt
dumped his share of ownership of the vacation home on North
Carolina's Outer Banks. George Archibald wrote that Gephardt, who is an
avid opponent of capital gains tax cuts, "claimed for
financial-disclosure purposes that his condo was not a rental property
the year he sold it for $183,000. He simultaneously claimed it
as a rental property for tax purposes to escape capital gains
taxes of about $17,000 in 1991." Archibald struck again with a
March 6 piece in the Washington Times noting that Rep. Bob Barr
(R-Ga.) formally requested the Justice Department undertake a
criminal probe of Gephardt's tax situation. Neither story
piqued the networks' curiosity.

On March 6, the conservative Landmark Legal Foundation filed
a complaint against House MinorityWhip David Bonior, the ethical
scold of Speaker Newt Gingrich, for misusing his congressional staff
to write a 1984 book on government time. The networks didn't
cover that either.

Paris Envy

"This morning we're taking a close look at the problem of
child care, a problem some countries are solving," co-host Harry
Smith announced on the February 21 CBS This Morning. The country with
the solution? France and its expensive, old-style socialist
system.

Smith marveled at the state-mandated benefits: "Like all new
mothers in France, Helene took a 16-week paid maternity leave
from her job. In addition, mothers who work for larger companies can
take off two more years unpaid, with the guarantee their jobs will
still be there when they get back." To support this system,
Smith admitted that taxes are "much higher in France than in
the United States...and that may be why they're going through
some of their own economic problems." But, incredibly, he also
referred to the system as free: "When Jeanne leaves day care,
she can attend a completely free, good quality, state-run
pre-school where she stays until she is six and primary school
begins." Smith followed the segment with an interview of Ellen
Galinsky of the liberal Families and Work Institute. His first
question was more accusation: "In the United States, are we just not
willing to pay for child care?"

ABC vs. the First Amendment

A special interest group wants to use the coercive power of
the government to silence the opposition. ABC News naturally
comes down on the side of free speech, right? Not quite. Here's how
Peter Jennings introduced a February 14 World News Tonight story:
"Supporters of gun control, who had no success convincing a
Republican Congress to pass stronger gun control legislation,
have adopted a new tactic. They have asked the Federal Trade
Commission to stop certain advertisements by gun
manufacturers."

Lisa Stark explained that the ads "sell safety and security,
offering guns as a way to protect loved ones, to guard home
and family. But critics say this picture is deceptive and misleading."
After a soundbite from Sarah Brady, Stark elaborated: "Gun
control advocates point to tragedies you won't find in the ads.
In Texas, a teenager shot and killed, mistaken for a burglar
by her father; in California, a four-year-old shoots himself,"
and a 15-year-old "killed by his best friend."

Stark asserted that "scientific studies show handguns are
more likely to hurt family members than protect them." ABC aired
three soundbites from opponents of the gun ads, but only one from
Tanya Metaksa of the National Rifle Association. Metaksa was
only allowed to defend the right to air ads, not to counter the
liberal statistics about gun accidents. If Stark had any
interest in balance, she could have noted that Dr. Arthur
Kellerman, a fervent gun control advocate, explained in the
August 14, 1994 U.S. News & World Report that "Studies such
as ours do not include cases in which intruders are wounded or
frightened away by the use or display of a firearm." Last year in his
book Guns, David Kopel noted that bicycle and swimming pool
accidents kill more children annually than do guns. If ABC
wants the FTC to regulate advertisements from weapon
manufacturers, then who will regulate the network's own gun
control ads disguised as journalism?

The Episcopalian Inquisition?

The word inquisition brings to mind torture sessions in dark
castles in medieval Europe where unbelievers were strapped to
the rack until they swore allegiance to the church. Recently, the
networks used the word to describe whether the Episcopal Church
should allow a practicing homosexual minister to lead church
services.

Peter Jennings led off the rhetorical overkill about Bishop
Walter Righter on the February 27 World News Tonight: "This next
story in the news tonight may conjure the Spanish Inquisition for some
but the dateline is Wilmington, Delaware. A retired bishop
could become the second Episcopal priest in the two hundred
year history of the U.S. Episcopal Church to be tried for
heresy, the most serious breach of Christian faith. His
offense: ordaining a practicing homosexual five years ago."

On the same night's CBS Evening News, reporter Richard
Threlkeld referred to the trial as something "right out of the middle
ages" and stated that "critics charge Bishop Righter's the victim
of a conservative inquisition." The idea that conservative
bishops inside the Episcopal Church wanted to enforce church
doctrine left Threlkeld scratching his head: "It's ironic that
something so medieval should be happening within the Episcopal
Church, one of the more tolerant of Protestant denominations."

Revolving Door: Coming Aboard Bill's Team

Two network veterans have joined the effort to re-elect
President Clinton. In the Clinton-Gore campaign office, Roll
Call reported that Joseph Lockhart, who bounces between Democratic
presidential campaigns and network slots, has bounced again, this
time into the national press secretary slot. Lockhart was an
assistant press secretary to Democratic candidate Walter
Mondale in 1984, then Press Secretary to Senator Paul Simon
until becoming assignment editor for ABC News in Chicago in
1985. He put in a stint as a deputy assignment editor at CNN
before joining the 1988 Dukakis-Bentsen campaign as a traveling
press aide. Stuart Schear, the off-air health and science reporter
until last year for the MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour, has joined the
White House press office as coordinator of local and national
TV interviews with the President, The Washington Post reported.
For the July/August 1995 Mother Jones, Schear wrote "a
consumer guide to the health insurer's new, overheated
advertising campaigns."

Politics in All News

ABC and Fox have chosen political operatives to head their
future all-news cable channels. ABC News President Roone Arledge
went left, hiring back former ABC News executive Jeff Gralnick from
NBC News where he's been Executive Producer of the NBC Nightly
News since 1993. In 1971 Gralnick served as Press Secretary to
liberal Senator George McGovern (D-S.D.). After promoting the
future presidential candidate, Gralnick jumped to ABC, where by
1979 he had risen to Executive Producer of World News Tonight.
He oversaw all election coverage for ABC since 1980, becoming
Vice President and Executive Producer of special events in
1985.

Fox Chairman Rupert Murdoch went to the right, naming Roger
Ailes, President of CNBC since 1993, as the chief executive of the
Fox All News Network as well as of the Fox broadcast news operation.
While producer of the Mike Douglas Show in the 1960s, Ailes
met Richard Nixon and left the show to become media adviser to
the 1968 Republican candidate's successful run. He spent the
next two decades devising media and ad strategies for GOP
candidates, including Ronald Reagan and George Bush. In 1992 he
took the helm of the Rush Limbaugh TV show as its Executive
Producer.

Raking in the Dough

Six media veterans are making out pretty well at the White
House, a June 26, 1995 payroll report shows. The March 1
Washington Times ran the list of salaries of 407 White House staffers
released by the Senate Appropriations Committee's subcommittee on
the Treasury, Postal Service and general government.

The list shows that speechwriting head Donald Baer, a former
U.S. News Assistant Managing Editor, earns $125,000 a year. Wall
Street Journal and Time reporter turned speechwriter Daniel Benjamin
gets $80,000, as do speechwriters Carolyn Curiel, a former
Nightline producer, and Alison Muscatine, a former Washington
Post reporter who also helped write First Lady Hillary
Clinton's book It Takes a Village. Deputy Press Secretary
Virginia Terzano, a CBS News election unit researcher in 1988,
pulls down $66,000. At the bottom end lies Anne Edwards at
$50,000, a former CBS News assignment editor and Senior Editor
for NPR who now runs the press advance operation.

TV to Computer Screen

First she reported the news, then she spun the news. Now
Kathleen deLaski will do both in cyberspace. America Online has
named her general manager of its politics section. In 1988 she became
an on-air report-er in Washington for ABC, jumping to the
Clinton team in 1993 as Chief Public Affairs Officer for the
Department of Defense where she remained through late 1994. For
the past year she's been Deputy to the Undersecretary for
Policy Liaison.

Reserving Rebukes for
Buchanan

When the liberal Center for Public Integrity released a
report February 15 showing Larry Pratt, co-chairman of the Pat
Buchanan campaign, had attended and spoken before meetings of white
supremacists and anti-semites, it led all the network evening
newscasts. Some made Buchanan guilty by association. "Pat
Buchanan was caught today in his own crossfire with accusations
that he is running a campaign of hate and bigotry," declared
Phil Jones on CBS.

But five days later, when Bill Clinton and Al Gore attended
the swearing in of Kweisi Mfume as President of the NAACP, the
networks refused to make an issue of Mfume's links to the Nation of
Islam's Louis Farrakhan. The four network evening shows didn't even
mention the event.

As New York Post editorial page editor Eric Breindel pointed
out February 29, Mfume "helped forge the 1993 `Sacred Covenant'
between the Congressional Black Caucus, which Mfume chaired, and Louis
Farrakhan's Nation of Islam." Surely, asked Breindel, "the
fringe-right groups with which Larry Pratt associates are no
more pernicious than the Farrakhanites."

Pratt, head of Gun Owners of America, immediately took a
leave of absence from the Buchanan campaign. "Mfume, by contrast,"
Breindel noted, "hasn't manifested any inclination to distance
himself from Farrakhan....the ex-Congressman hasn't even been
asked to do so." Not even after Farrakhan praised the leaders
of Libya, Iraq and Iran during a world trip. Farrakhan accepted
a $1 billion pledge from Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi for
his separatist organization to "mobilize `oppressed' minorities
to influence this year's U.S. elections," The Washington Post
reported February 17, three days before Clinton stood beside
Mfume.

Back in the U.S., Farrakhan offered some fresh anti-semitism.
In a clip shown February 29 on Rush Limbaugh, he said: "When you bring
me before Congress, I'm going to call the roll of all the
Congressmen who are honorary members of the Israeli Knesset and
get contributions from the Zionist AIPAC, and then I want you
to register as a foreign power! Every year you give Israel $46
billion of the taxpayers' money and you haven't asked the
taxpayers one damn thing. Who are you an agent of?"

Did reporters demand Clinton explain his support of
Farrakhan backer Mfume? No, they were too busy tarnishing Buchanan. In a
February 23 NBC Nightly News piece, Gwen Ifill proffered to
Buchanan: "People say that you are a sexist, a racist, an
anti-semite." Ifill concluded that "Buchanan fancies himself a
trench-fight-er, a warrior for a new conservatism of the heart.
But increasingly he's being judged by the company he keeps."
That's not a judgment reporters made of Clinton.

Poor, Poor, OSHA

The Congress may have failed so far to pass a regulatory
reform bill, but The Washington Post is warning of the
consequences of "deregulation" nonetheless. In a four-part February
18-21 series titled "De Facto Deregulation," Post reporters didn't
so much describe "deregulation" as they did the frustration of
regulators and their political allies at their inability to
implement additional rules.

In the first story, reporter Cindy Skrzycki did feature
opinions from the "libertarian" Cato Institute and the
"conservative" National Center for Public Policy Research, but leftist
Ralph Nader was simply a "consumer activist." Despite their
prominence in the series, liberal groups like the Natural
Resources Defense Council (NRDC) were not described as liberal.

Stephen Barr's story on the Occupational Safety and Health
Administration (OSHA) read like a bureaucrat's newsletter,
beginning with the headline "Cuts Frustrate OSHA Plans to Improve Worker
Safety." Barr mourned the agency's 15 percent budget reduction
and trotted out the OSHA line that it has far too few
inspectors to enforce its regulations in every business across
the nation. Barr passed on OSHA complaints that it hasn't
enough money for its office redesign plans and computer
networking operations. Barr added that its employees "likely
will lose part of their salaries through unpaid furlough days....The
possibility of layoffs has flattened morale at OSHA and left many
OSHA employees feeling anxious about their futures."

Barr didn't address the philosophical point of new
congressional oversight -- that for decades, regulatory agencies had no
check or balance in the legislative branch -- or the obvious
counterpoint that OSHA's actions have often caused economic
frustrations and anxieties to businesses.

In the last article of the series, reporter Gary Lee mourned
the failure to implement new revisions from the 1990 Clean Air
Act reauthorization. As David Hawkins of the NRDC complained in the
series' last paragraph: "We'll never be able to get clean air in
areas like [Baltimore or Houston] without stricter enforcement
of the act." Apparently to the Post, "deregulation" doesn't
mean the repeal of regulations, but merely slowing down the
juggernaut of ever-increasing government interference.

Tendentious Tenure

The national news media continually call for increased
funding of public education, but they rarely ask if teachers' unions
could be the problem.

A February 16 20/20 report and the February 26 U.S. News & World Report
both looked at the declining quality of public education, and
came to the same conclusion: Teachers unions are at the heart
of the problem. In a cover story entitled `Why Teachers Don't
Teach,' U.S. News summed it up: "The nation's future lies
in its classrooms. But teachers' unions are driving out good teachers,
coddling bad ones and putting bureaucracy in the way of
quality education."

Both reports allowed unionized teachers to explain how they
believe tenure protects them from unfair firings, but reporter Lynn
Sherr revealed: "It often takes so long, it's so expensive and
usually so unsuccessful at getting rid of allegedly bad
teachers, some boards of education have thrown up their hands
at even trying." Sherr continued: "Most elementary and
secondary school teachers in this country have tenure...they
have lifetime employment. It is virtually impossible to get rid
of them." Sherr recounted the story of a school board in
Connecticut that had to spend $250,000 in taxpayer money to fire an
inadequate teacher who was later reinstated even though she was
found partially incompetent.

While the media constantly warn voters of the Republican Party's pandering to the NRA and the Christian Coalition, U.S. News
pointed out the political power of the National Education
Association: "But teachers unions have used their resources to fight
reform -- and their resources are vast."

The union spent $52 million to renovate their Washington headquarters, which U.S. News called: "A testament to its power in national politics, where the NEA has wedded itself to the

Democratic Party. The union handed out $8.9 million to
congressional candidates between 1989 and 1995, only a fraction of it to
the Republicans."

Detecting Deception

CNN's Brooks Jackson was first out of the gate to critique
the presidential candidates in their ads and speeches. On the
April 1 Inside Politics he critiqued Republican charges that
Clinton judges were soft on crime. But in a surprising turn Jackson has
also slammed Clinton's newest set of ads. His April 4 "Spin
Patrol" segment challenged each claim made in the Democratic
National Committee ads.

CNN aired the ad: "The President proposes a balanced budget
protecting Medicare, education, the environment. But Dole is
voting no. The President cuts taxes for 40 million Americans.
Dole votes no."

Jackson replied: "Dole voting no to a balanced budget and
tax cuts? Let's see that again...True, Clinton's latest budget
would balance in 7 years on paper, but experts are skeptical."
Jackson used moderate-to-liberal Carol Cox Wait of the
Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget and Robert Reischauer of the
Brookings Institution.

Jackson found the ad's claim "The President cuts taxes for
40 million Americans" was "Not the whole story." He pointed out
that the Clinton administration arrived at the 40 million
number through the 1993 budget bill's expansion of the earned
income tax credit to "15 million low wage families, 40 million if you
count their children." Jackson countered they also raised taxes
on 1.5 million high-income families and 5 million Social
Security recipients, not to mention higher gas taxes for
everyone.

Another ad claimed Republicans cut school lunches. Jackson:
"Not so. The Republican Congress appropriated more money for
school lunches this year....And the Agriculture Department says
it has increased the number of children served."

The same ad charged the GOP cut Head Start: "Money for the
Head Start pre-school program has been cut four percent this
year, temporarily. But Republican leaders have agreed to a one
percent increase once a permanent appropriations bill is passed.
Meanwhile not a single child has been affected. In fact Head Start
enrollment is up this year."

And the DNC's claim that Republicans "cut child health care"
did not go unchallenged. Jackson explained that Republicans
only reduced the rate of Medicaid growth and that there is not
much difference between the GOP and Clinton's proposal.

CBS Spikes Goldberg for His Honesty

Blew the Wrong Whistle

What a difference the message makes. After 60 Minutes last
fall spiked part of an interview with Jeffrey Wigand, the ex-Brown
& Williamson cigarette company executive, CBS reporters were
angry and embarrassed that Wigand's confidentiality pledge
prevented him from blowing the whistle on his former employer.
On February 4, CBS overcame the legal hurdle and aired the
spiked charges about manipulated nicotine levels. On PBS's
Charlie Rose February 6 Dan Rather said that story "was gutsy,
great reporting."

Fast forward a week and CBS correspondent Bernard Goldberg
blew the whistle on CBS, detailing in a February 13 Wall Street
Journal op-ed how colleague Eric Engberg's story on the flat tax "set
new standards for bias." Goldberg explained that "The old
argument that the networks and other `media elites' have a
liberal bias is so blatantly true that it's hardly worth
discussing anymore."

So did journalists trumpet this whistle-blower? Hardly.
"It's such a wacky charge....I don't know what Bernie was
driving at. It just sounds bizarre," Face the Nation's Bob Schieffer
told The Washington Post. "To accuse Eric of liberal bias is
absurd," sniffed CBS News President Andrew Heyward. "The test
is not the names people call you or accusations by political
activists inside or outside your own organization," Rather told
the New York Post in an insult to Goldberg's professionalism,
insisting "I am not going to be cowed by anybody's special
political agenda."

USA Today's Peter Johnson reported March 11: "Some
colleagues supported him privately. But many others stopped talking to
him, dismissing him as dead wrong, an ingrate, a nut or all of
the above. Mostly, the big chill set in. Not-so-coincidentally,
none of his commentary segments on the News, `Bernard
Goldberg's America,' has aired since the day his piece came
out."

Johnson concluded that CBS has decided to bully the
messenger: "Goldberg has spent the past month lying low, hoping animus
toward him would die down. It hasn't, and all signs around CBS
News are that it will continue until Goldberg shows interest in
eating a healthy serving of humble pie."

The March 13 New York Post reported that Goldberg apologized
to Engberg and is sorry if he "hurt anyone's feelings." But
Goldberg felt he had to go public since, as he explained to the Post's
Josef Adalian, he "tried for years and years to discuss this
issue," but was "met with varying degrees of `Who cares?'"

Janet Cooke Award: McNamara Tries Guilt by Association

After newscasts highlighted the story of Larry Pratt, the
Pat Buchanan campaign co-chairman who resigned to combat the
discovery that he spoke in a number of forums where racists and other
bigots appeared, liberal Boston Globe columnist Tom Oliphant
loaded his February 20 column with friendly fire: "For liberals
to be silent simply because this filth is being directed at a
creature of the Right who happens to be on a political roll is
intolerable." If the networks wished to investigate the charge
of bigotry against Buchanan, they had a library of columns and
an archive of video clips to spend weeks hunting through for
examples. Instead of doing the hard work of combing the
minutiae of his paper (and TV) trail, the networks decided to practice
guilt by association, suggesting his campaign appeal is too
indiscriminate, too likely to appeal to bigots.

In a February 23 Nightline, ABC's Ted Koppel refined the
issue: "It's not that Pat Buchanan today is associated with overtly
anti-Semitic or racist acts or statements, but rather that he has
created an image of someone who might be sympathetic to such
acts or statements by others." Koppel not only suggested
Buchanan's father was a regular listener to the anti-Semitic
radio show of Father Coughlin (he later apologized when the
family denied this), he even stooped to accusing Buchanan's
little brothers of having beaten up Jewish kids in the 1950s.
This is odd coming from Koppel, who said of Bill Clinton's 1969
draft-dodging thank-you letter: "If we were electing that
23-year-old man, what he said and thought and felt at that time would be
germane."

Koppel ended his show with a pro-Buchanan letter from
Russian nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky charging Israel controls
America's finances "through American Jews or Negroes." Koppel
concluded: "It's not that Buchanan hasn't expressed some of the
views that Zhirinovsky echoed, but perhaps he'd never realized
how ugly they sounded until he heard them in the mouth of a
genuine bigot." For a desperate search for damaging Buchanan
allies, the other networks could not match CBS. For finding
Buchanan guilty by association with people he's either
repudiated or never heard of, CBS reporter Bob McNamara won the
March Janet Cooke Award. On the February 28 Evening News, Dan Rather
began the story: "For his part, Buchanan vowed to come back big
in the next phase of primaries and immediately, quote, `lit
into' Forbes during a southern campaign swing today, lit into
Forbes as too liberal. At the same time, Buchanan is trying to
deflect criticism that he is an extremist, who, at the very
least, uses code words to attract voters with racist, bigoted
views. Buchanan flatly denies this. Correspondent Bob Mc-
Namara has been looking into it."

McNamara moved quickly to the issue of Buchanan's fans:
"They were waiting 3,000 strong for Pat Buchanan outside Atlanta
last night. They say they've been waiting for years... Here, his call
to take back the country is a crowd pleaser. But outside the
campaign, critics charge that Buchanan's rhetoric is making
this race about race. And the man and his ideas are now
beginning to be judged by the company they keep."

McNamara explained: "Lurking in the shadows of last month's
Louisiana campaign, there was former Klan leader David Duke."
Duke told CBS: "I let the word out to all my supporters in the state
that I supported Patrick Buchanan, and if Patrick goes on to win
the nomination, I guess part of the credit will have to go to
us." McNamara allowed a perfunctory rebuttal: "It is not an
endorsement Buchanan wants, and today his backers took pains to
distance their man from charges of extremism on economics and
immigration, race, and religion." CBS aired Buchanan backer
Rabbi Aryeh Spero: "This is a guilt by association, which is
very dangerous to our whole political system."

Focusing on racism, McNamara countered: "Today, even in the
New South, old ideas have not been completely laid to rest. And
for people uncomfortable with the way the world has changed, Buchanan's
message is hitting home....Danny Carver is a roofing
contractor, a Christian, and a lifetime member of the Ku Klux
Klan. He says he and Buchanan speak the same language." Carver
told McNamara: "About everything he says we agree with....When
he's talking about affirmative action he has to be talking
about women and niggers, I guess." McNamara asked: "Do you
think Buchanan would want to hear that you support him?" Carver
replied: "He would want to hear it, but he don't want it on TV."

CBS didn't explain how Carver came to their attention. He's
not an unknown, but a self-promoting semi-regular on Howard Stern's
syndicated radio show. Stern, who's Jewish and calls Carver a
"lunatic," has featured him as the butt of humor on his Butt
Bongo Fiesta video (where he struck out in the game "Guess
Who's the Jew"), and as a judge of the topless "Miss Howard
Stern" contest in a 1993 New Year's Eve pay-per-view special.

McNamara concluded: "The Buchanan campaign said tonight that
it adamantly rejects all forms of racism as immoral, saying
that their campaign is, quote, `populated by people who embrace the
sense of justice in the Old and New Testament.' But he has become a
candidate battling a political Catch-22. A man who says what
he means and means what he says and now must fight the embrace
of people who think they know exactly what he is talking
about." CBS News spokeswoman Kim Apgar told MediaWatch "I can't
speak to this. You need McNamara." But CBS could not locate a
number where McNamara could be reached.

While CBS attempted to connect Buchanan with neo-Nazis and
the KKK, they have been critical of any look at the associations of
Bill Clinton. In October 1992, The Washington Times and others
investigated Clinton's role in the anti-Vietnam war movement.
Father Richard McSorley's book Peace Eyes recounts Clinton's
role as an organizer of a protest service that ended in a march
to the U.S. embassy with white crosses, left "as an indication
of our desire to end the agony of Vietnam." McSorley reported
the protest's organizers were "Group 68 (Americans in
Britain)," which "had the support" of the British Peace
Council, a Soviet front group.

After Clinton's anti-war involvement came up in the first
presidential debate, CBS This Morning co-host Harry Smith declared
on October 12: "Clearly, that red-baiting junk didn't work last
night." The networks aired no stories questioning "the company
Clinton keeps" or suggesting "It's not that Clinton has
signaled through acts or statements his support for the Soviet
Union, but that he created an image of someone who might be
sympathetic to such acts or statements." They called it a
smear. Guilt by association is clearly a game reporters play on
only one side.

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